Research on cooperation strategy of enterprises' quality and safety in food supply chain

Abstract

In order to prevent and control risk factors which harm the quality and safety of the food supply chain effectively and reduce the probability of food safety incidents, this paper investigated on some problems of the upstream and downstream enterprises of the food supply chain under the three different forms of cooperation based on the neoclassic economics and game theory method. These problems include the effectiveness of the quality and safety efforts, the profits, the effect of the losses that the food safety incidents caused on the quality efforts' efficacy, and the social welfare comparison. Meanwhile, we constructed evolutionary game model to analyze the macro and micro factors that influenced the cooperation strategy and demonstrated the effect of diversity of decision-making parameters on evolution results based on numerical simulation. By the theoretical and simulation analysis, we found that (1) the quality efforts' efficacy, the profits, the sensitivity coefficient of the quality efforts efficiency to the losses, and the social welfare without thinking about the externality all met their maximum under the full cooperation situation; (2) strengthening supervision over the source of the food supply chain can reduce the probability of food safety incidents; (3) macro and micro environment will be the important basis for companies' decision-making on cooperation strategy in the food supply chain.